This page takes on three important questions about the Identification Project: what, what for, and how to (here's where you can find the assignment sheet[s]). My goal is to make this page as useful to you as possible, so let me know if it can be improved. If anything is badly worded, unclear, or missing, please contact me with constructive criticisms and suggestions. Thanks.

What

The Identification Project is designed to encourage self-awareness, self-reflection, and a critical engagement with the course material. It consists of an initial personal/reflective essay (due F 2/8/13) which you then revise into a longer experimental/persuasive blog post for a public audience (due no later than F 4/26/13), building on your responses to the readings, in-class discussions, and discussion board posts that have most influenced you in the course. After one last revision based on my comments, you may become a co-author on the American Identities blog and post your final version (or have me post it for you) for the world to see.

The first stage of the Identification Project is to write a personal essay that, in three separate sections--using self-reflection, storytelling, and theorizing, respectively--conveys your perception of your own identity, your experience with American identities, and understanding of the concept of American identities. The three sections do not have to be unified under a general theme or overall argument and you don't even have to work particularly hard to create connections between them if you don't want to. The point is to explore your thinking early in the semester and then see how it evolves over the next couple of months.

By the time the revision of this initial essay is due, we will be fairly close to completing the semester's readings. Your task for this "re-vision" is to change your relatively fragmented personal essay, with its emphasis on self-reflection, into a relatively coherent experimental blog post with an emphasis on reaching, engaging, and moving a public audience by sharing your take on American Identities and using yourself as an example. It's not exactly a persuasive or argumentative essay, that is, because it doesn't have to be thesis-driven in the narrow sense, but you should work hard to move readers to take seriously the perspective you're bringing to bear on the issues you've chosen to focus on. Putting yourself in dialogue, explicitly and implicitly, with the writers and ideas in the course that have influenced you the most or prompted the most productive internal dialogues is one good way to accomplish all these things, but the final revision shouldn't read like a book report or research paper--developing your own purpose and voice and organization and audience for the piece is what makes this an experimental essay.

What For

The Identification Project is designed to encourage self-awareness, self-reflection, and a critical engagement with the course material--to confront the common assumption that it's easy to separate learning from the learner. In other words, the assignment is meant to demonstrate that this course isn't about 'others,' that your own identity and how you understand it and feel about it are on the line here, as well--whatever that identity may be. Further, it's meant to allow you space to explore and reflect upon your own ideas, experiences, beliefs, values, and assumptions with respect to a range of significant identity markers or group affiliations or structuring forces, such as age, gender, nationality, race, ethnicity, religion, class, and sexuality, among many others. In pedagogical terms, think of this project as consisting of a pre- and post-assessment that allows us both to consider your growth and development in the course and your engagement with the course as a whole--or at least as close to one as is feasible. By supplementing our course materials' focus on national, regional, and historical identities with a focus on individual and personal identities, the Identification Project allows you to analyze and reflect on American Identities from the macro- to the micro-level.

How To

Here's the assignment sheet for the initial essay.

Due: by 11:30 pm Friday, 8 February 2013, in the Identification Project (IP) drop box in the Lessons area of the course ANGEL site.

Assignment: write a personal essay in three sections: 1) a reflection of at least two pages on how you identify yourself (what aspects of your identity are most crucial to you?); 2) a narration of at least two pages on a significant experience you had with American identities (what happened? what did it reveal? what did you realize?); 3) a statement of at least two pages of your beliefs/values/principles on how we ought to define and understand American identities (who are "we"? who ought "we" to be?). These sections do not need to be explicitly related to each other.

Format: typed or word-processed; minimum of two pages per section; double spaced, with reasonable fonts, font sizes, and margins (be warned that barely getting onto the 2nd sheet of paper does not a two-page section make!); heading that includes your name, the course name or number, and the date; title that alludes to main themes of the essay; subtitles that indicate your focus in each section; formatting, bibliography, and citations (if you choose to use either of the latter two) in a recognized style like APA or MLA (see the links page for explanations and examples of MLA style; the basic template is: Author. "Title of Poem, or Essay, or Story." Title of Book from which It Comes. Ed., Editor of Book [if any]. City of Publication: Publisher, Date of Publication. Page Numbers.); proper quotation format in body of paper according to the citation style you've chosen (for MLA, it's typically author's last name and page number in parentheses in body of paper--"..." (Lipsitz 17).--and blockquote format for quotations five lines or longer).

Audience: In general, think of your immediate audience as those who have taken and are taking this class. Rethinking who your audience is and how the essay needs to be changed will be part of the "re-vision" process for this project, and it's never too early to approach this task thoughtfully after you turn in the initial draft.

Grading Criteria: The initial essay will receive a grade based strictly on the effectiveness of each section's structure in conveying your ideas and experiences and the quality of the paper's prose (including grammar, syntax, and punctuation). This grade will be one small factor of the overall Identification Project grade.

Here's the assignment sheet for the "re-vision" to the initial essay.

Due: by 11:30 pm Friday, 26 April 2013, in the Identification Project (IP) drop box in the Lessons area of the course ANGEL site. After getting comments from me on your paper, you may decide to revise it for "publication" on the American Identities course blog; if you want the extra credit that goes along with this, you must email your essay as an attachment to me and list the pseudonym you want it to be posted under in the heading after your name [should you want to hide your actual identity]). You may also respond to my invitation (over email) to join the blog if you wish to post your essay on it yourself and continue blogging there after the course ends.

Assignment: Revise the first draft of your personal essay into a relatively coherent experimental blog post that shifts smoothly between narrative, reflective, and theoretical modes of writing in a style that best conveys how your ideas about the relation between American identities and your own identity have changed or developed in the course and best inspires your readers to consider doing a similar self-examination and self-reflection of their own. Your job is to turn your personal reflections into something that a public audience will find interesting, inspiring, and thought-provoking.

Format: Your paper must be typed or word-processed; a minimum of ten pages; double spaced, with reasonable fonts, font sizes, and margins (be warned that barely getting onto the 10th sheet of paper does not a ten-page essay make!); with a heading that includes your name, the course name or number, and the date; a title that alludes to main themes of the essay; subtitles that indicate your focus in each section (if you continue to use sections or break it up into new sections); formatting, bibliography, and citations (if you choose to use either of the latter two) in a recognized style like APA or MLA (see the links page for explanations and examples of MLA style; the basic template is: Author. "Title of Poem, or Essay, or Story." Title of Book from which It Comes. Ed., Editor of Book [if any]. City of Publication: Publisher, Date of Publication. Page Numbers.); proper quotation format in body of paper according to the citation style you've chosen (for MLA, it's typically author's last name and page number in parentheses in body of paper--"..." (Yamashita 17).--and blockquote format for quotations five lines or longer).

Audience: In general, think of your immediate audience as someone who may be interested in the core issues of the course but who has not been taking this class; hence, you can't assume that your readers have read any course texts you may be referring to or writing on, so you have to include the kind of background that someone not taking this course would need. Rethinking who your audience is for this "re-vision" and how the initial essay needs to be changed in light of it is one of the big challenges of the Identification Project.

Grading Criteria: The "re-vision" will be graded in terms of its ability to convey how your ideas about the relation between American identities and your own identity have changed or developed in the course and to inspire your readers to consider doing a similar self-examination and self-reflection of their own; the quality and coherence of the ideas, experiences, and stories that reveal your essay's main goal(s), audience(s), and interlocutor(s); the effectiveness of the essay's structure and organization in contributing toward its main goal(s) and to the dialogue between writers who use this form or who write on related topics; and the quality of the essay's prose (including grammar, syntax, punctuation, and formatting). This grade will be one fairly large factor of the overall Identification Project grade. Other factors include the ambitiousness and success of the "re-vision"'s development of the ideas and stories from the initial essay; the effectiveness of each section of the initial essay in conveying your ideas and experiences and the quality of each section's prose (including grammar, syntax, and punctuation); the overall grade for the initial essay.

Advice: Think of this revision as an exploration of the meaning of American identities today through a mix of writing modes that draw on your own identifications and affiliations. You might ask yourself the following questions as you consider what you want to convey about American identities today and how: What is "national" identity? Is it legal status, participation in a particular culture or multiculture or transculture, participation in a certain kind of political-economic system, commitment to a set of ideas or principles, a certain kind of emotion, or what? How does "national" identity relate to other identities (racial, ethnic, gender, class, religious, regional, subcultural, transnational, etc.)? In what ways do you identify personally as an "American"? In what circumstances do you feel "most" American? How to convey how it feels to be American without lapsing into overgeneralizations, stereotypes, or cliches?